Twitter Bootcamp! Grow your Professional Learning Network

This is an amazing opportunity to grow your PLN.  Every Educational Leader, Instructional Coach, and Teacher benefit from Twitter because it is such an amazing tool to use for professional growth. 

It also puts you in contact with experts in the teaching field from all over the world, offering fresh ideas for everything from student engagement to differentiated instruction to conflict resolution.  

Take advantage of Jennifer Hogan's Twitter Bootcamp starting up soon.  She is a must follow on Twitter (@Jennifer_Hogan)    

I can't tell you how much this Bootcamp means to me.  I first started Twitter in September of this year with barely anyone in my PLN.  After this boot camp, Jennifer helped me expand my PLN.  

Here are the numbers after I took from her Bootcamp:

Your Tweets earned 238.1K impressions over this 28 day period

Amazing right!! Numbers speak for themselves.  What I loved the most, however, was all the relationships that I gained through this experience.   

I'm proud to be joining and getting to know this new cohort starting soon.  So, dive right in!!! You have all to gain and nothing to lose.  

The next 21 Day Twitter Bootcamp starts March 5th!! Click here for the {{link}}.



Image from @sylviaduckworth

PLCs: It's okay to hit the "reset" button

My district is in year 3 of PLCs.  I love the concept of a PLC.  Maybe even borderline obsessed with a hint of crazy about it.

Since our district is at its nascent stage of the process, I used Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) to help guide me.

Here are the main takeaways from this book that helped me understand more about PLCs:

1.  The PLC is not a program, it is a mindset.  It's an on-going and continuous process that has a profound impact on the culture of the school.  You know your PLC is in trouble when teachers think its a mandate, not a mindset.  Everyone needs to be all hands on deck.

2. Understand the Professional, Learning, and Community in PLC.

"Professional"-  implies that the work of professionals is rooted in best practice.
"Learning"- the highest levels of learning for all students is significantly impacted by the quality of adult learning.  Teachers have a moral imperative to keep learning.
"Community"- that collaborative teams are a must for ensuring the highest levels of learning.

3. Interdependence is a keyword.  Teachers cannot work in isolation or independently, nor should teachers be depending on other teachers to do all the work.  In order for everyone to take ownership of the process, promote the concept of teacher leaders working interdependently and collaboratively.

3.  The team is not a PLC. The PLC is the school community and the team is the engine that drives that improvement.  Whose driving?  Teacher Leaders!  This concept is huge for me.

Teacher Leaders are instrumental in facilitating meetings, not Administrators. As a balance, having an Instructional Coach to help guide you is imperative.  I benefited from the guidance of having many planning and feedback sessions from both my phenomenal Instructional Coaches to make sure the PLC was on track.

4. Begin with the "Why?" to establish the mission.  A lot of times teachers confuse this with the "how?"

The team needs to start with a shared fundamental purpose for the PLC and then only after that can they collectively establish the vision (the What?) and the values (the How?) to meet the goal.

They are known as the four pillars:

5. Norms are necessary as well as a protocol when conflict arises.  Luckily, we have not had any Fight Club scenes and hopefully, it never gets to that point.

6. Ground your work on four questions to drive collective inquiry and action research:  Learning By Doing (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) has them listed as:

• What is it that we want our students to know and be able to do?
• How will we know if each student has learned it?
• How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
• How will we extend the learning for students who have demonstrated proficiency? 

The above should be the go-to questions for teachers.  The PLC leaves teachers inherently vulnerable when sharing their work, so it helps to keep the focus on student learning and not the mentality of "why weren't students taught this last year."  Keep the entire process as positive as possible.

There are so many things that are inextricably linked that its hard to give a silver bullet answer to what makes a PLC work.  The process is messy and you have to give yourself permission to hit the reset button.

Also, I firmly believe in giving teachers a manual that helps guide them through the process.  I have spent hours learning about this process and in keeping a commonality of understanding for the entire district, a book or handouts is a must.

________________
Learning By Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour, DuFour, Easker, Many, 2010) is a wonderful resource to have a guide you.   Another resource I used was Every School, Every Team, Every Classroom by Robert Eaker & Janel Keating, which is also a title from Solution Tree.

           

My Message to My Younger Self: Know your "Why?"

Dr. Amy Fast tweeted this on January 21, 2018.  I loved it so much that I went back on her twitter feed just to search for this quote and after what felt like going through a thousand tweets, I found it. Yup, I know. I'm crazy.

But I have to tell you.  This question has been and probably will be permanently stuck in my mind.

A couple of months ago, our Instructional Supervisors led a faculty meeting that asked us the same question.  I was intrigued.  Besides my first initial hiring interview 13 years ago, I can promise you that no one has ever asked that of me since.

But if you are like me-- borderline obsessed with Twitter-- you would have absolutely seen similar quotes that not only demands you know your "why?" but also urges you to inspire the heck out of your students to know theirs.

Let's go back to the question then.  "What's your why?... Why are we here?"

As I sat in the auditorium after school, drained, and exhausted, we were asked those two questions.  I remember rummaging through my brain for what I thought was the correct answer to my Supervisors' questions.  My only response at the moment,  "Oh, God, please don't call on me."  Lame, right?

Such a simple question really.

Yesterday, I picked up Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani.  In their initial chapters, they remind us that throughout a student's 12-13 years of school, they would have received 14 THOUSAND hours of instruction.  That's 840,000 minutes no matter how you slice it.

It's quite shocking really. I am in my 13th year of teaching.  This message clearly hit home for me.   I have taught as long as an entire course of one child's educational tenure.

I have spent 14 thousand hours educating children.  But oh, what a privilege it has been.  After all of these years, I am even more passionate about my profession.

"Choose a profession that you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."  I love being a teacher and it is my hope we continue to elevate it as a noble vocation.

My "why?" has somewhat changed during these past thirteen years but I always come back to this.

My "why?" is to empower all my students to find what they are passionate about and to not only stop there, but to make sure they feed it, nurture it, and then share it with the world.

My message to my younger self is this:

"Empowering students means giving kids the knowledge and skills to pursue their passions, interests, and future."  - Bill Ferriter via Empower.

I'm a firm believer in this.  If we are cognizant that a student spends 400 minutes per day in our schools, how are we empowering them to take ownership of what they find interesting?

I am sure my "why" is different from yours.  But, this is the most important lesson that I learned:

We all know "the what" of our profession, but know your "why" so that your "what" has more impact because you are working towards a purpose.

My younger self would respond:  "Thank you.  Be kind to yourself.  Continue to dedicate yourself to the kids you teach. There is plenty of work to be done."

-Simon Sinek

____________________

Dr. Amy Fast (@fastcrayon) is a must follow on Twitter.  She's inspiring and I love her message. Her book is called It's the Mission, Not the Mandates: Defining the Purpose of Public Education. 

Empower: What Happens When Students Own Their Learning by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani is a must read.  Such a fun and inspiring book.  Truly a "pick me up" kind of book.  Highly recommend.

Teacher Leadership: Is Your District Striving or Sustaining?

The Art of Teacher Leadership is asking teachers to master the following:

1. The Art of Teaching
2. The Art of Leading
3. The Art of Coaching

Teachers lead every day.  It's a vocation that embraces leadership as its core.  They make instructional choices in their classrooms to best fit the needs of every one of their students.  Those who do the job well are always reflecting and collaborating, always reaching the end goal of highest level attainable for student engagement and learning.

Those that go above and beyond are the unsung heroes.  They make changes and contribute to the overall well-being of the school climate without a title. What they also face, however, is criticism from others as doers and overachievers because this role 1) has not been clearly defined in the district or 2) has been an afterthought to the numerous initiatives instead of prioritizing its role in leading them.

Just recently, ASCD released an article called Four Ways to Create a Positive School Culture in which it highlighted Teacher Leadership as their number 1 attribute for raising the standards of student achievement.  It is no surprise that fostering the Teacher Leader model also increases teacher effectiveness and retention.

Compliance versus Empower 

In Katie Martin's book, Learner Centered Innovation, she discusses the importance of the evolving role of the educator.  How can we best empower our teachers to maintain a rigor of excellence?

Here are some ways to promote Teacher Leadership in your school:

1. Train them.  Teacher's need to learn how to effectively coach and how to productively disperse the responsibilities of leading to others. Teacher Leadership training can begin with new hires, but don't neglect the expertise of the veteran teachers.  All teachers inherently want to lend a hand. It takes a village to roll out this mindset.

2. Promote them.  If your message is true that you value teachers as leaders, what does your district's philosophy on promoting these leaders look like?  Nothing shows a more incongruent practice than training teacher leaders but stopping short of hiring them as administrators.

3. Offer teacher led professional development.  The most meaningful professional development have come from those most knowledgeable about their own fields.  This empowers your teacher to act as facilitators, mentors and celebrates their expertise.

4. Provide a library of books and resources.  If our intentions as educators are to promote a love of learning in our students, we should be allocating funds to developing a professional learning library to promote the same behavior in our teachers.  Consequently, resources also allow teachers to build upon common definitions of practices instituted in the district.

5. Mentorships.  We need more mentors.  All educators should either be mentoring or have a mentor in all stages of their career.  It's that simple.

It is my hope that the model of Teacher Leadership thrives in all districts and schools.  As we ask teachers to trust in the potential of our students, leaders too must trust in the potential of the teachers they lead.

____________________________

Credit: The picture of the Teacher Leadership wheel was from the Kentucky Teacher Leadership Framework 

Katie Martin's book Learner Centered Innovation is a great read to empower those your lead.

Empathy. What is Your Superpower?

In order to be an effective teacher leader, you must be able to collaborate as well as facilitate.

Empathy in its purest form is the ability to connect and relate to others. A leader who grounds their interactions on empathy has the ability to harness creativity, growth, and innovation from those they lead.

This skill is not only being a good listener but also extends to being able to adapt and build on strengths in order to discover new opportunities for collaboration. All that I have mentioned is impossible to do without empathy.

I believe in mankind. I believe in the goodness and kindness that there is in people. However, it still makes me uncomfortable that our world is filled with apathy and that my children will one day be exposed to it.  Therefore, our moral imperative as educators, in my opinion, is to teach our students to value and embrace empathy. It’s not easy. It took me a couple of tries to get it.

My 8th graders just spent weeks on a unit about Values and Traditions. A huge takeaway for me was:
1) that my students did not only know how to define these terms,
2) they were equally lost in what forms values and traditions manifest itself in the environment around them.

That’s where we started.

After that was when my students were able to make connections to another culture’s practices and perspectives. It was at that point then that we were able to expand this by identifying problems in our community and abroad and we asked ourselves what can we do as to contribute to the wellbeing of others.

After weeks of my students and I grappling with this, here’s my big message for teachers: Empathy must be the lens in which we examine all our units of study if we truly believe as educators that we are preparing our students for life in the 21st century.

How does empathy shape our interactions with parent-teacher communication?

Recently, I tweeted an instance in which I had just finished a parent-teacher conference for my own 4-year-old daughter. Hindsight, it was absolutely the best "professional development" that I had ever gone through to teach me about being considerate to the feeling of every parent that I will ever interact with in the future.

See tweet below:

One comment stated that we as teachers need to be sensitive as parents advocate for their child. We are on the same team and everyone is in this for the well being of the child.

“All you need is love,” but I have to add… What we really need is love and empathy.

________________
This tweet was retweeted 57 times with 217 likes as of February 14, 2018. It had 29 THOUSAND impressions and not one snarky comment was ever posted.  I am a believer in humanity.

I will bet on the goodness in people. I hope you will too. #Trendthepositive.

Global Competency and Being Future Driven

Global Competency.  If you haven’t learned or heard of this term yet, go ahead and google it.  I’ll be honest, I never of this term until today, but when I read the description, I know that I do embrace this philosophy.  I’m no expert, but I invite you to learn along with me.

I’ve started reading David Geurin’s book Future Driven and I am hooked.  When I get hooked on something, I become obsessed with learning all that I can.  Today, it was all about Global Competency and why we need this in our classrooms.  

I would define global competencies as developing an understanding and awareness of other cultures' perspective as a critical piece in preparing learners for life and work in the 21st century.  

If you want students to make connections globally, they must first learn to understand the culture. Culture is multifaceted.  Teachers need to pay close attention to how they approach teaching it because culture is married to empathy.  It’s not a skill you can teach overnight.

In order for the learner to be a future-ready learner, they must have a self-awareness and make connections with the philosophical perspectives, the behavioral practices, and the products of the culture they are studying.   

In promoting empathy, let's take a look at how this would manifest in content.  Rather than adding culture as an afterthought, begin a new unit by examining cultural images and artifacts and authentic materials that can tap a learners' interest.  

Going forward with what I learned about global competency, I will continue planning lessons that facilitate students making connections about what is shared between cultures.  

I’m am excited to assign more project-based learning that is multidisciplinary, standards-aligned and allow students to contribute their creativity to the end product.

Global competency in the classroom can also look very "future driven” by prompting students to identify problems and providing solutions to these gaps. While I do believe that making connections is important, it is equally important to help learners expect differences and learn how to explain and analyze these observed differences.

That’s what I learned today! I have to get back to learning more about it and I hope I did this topic justice.   

What do you think? How can you embrace this in your teaching practices going forward?

___________

Credit:

I learned the term Global Competency through the Participate website.  Check them out on Twitter (@participate).

Future Driven by David Guerin is awesome! He is a must follow on Twitter as well (@davidgeurin).  I’m still at the beginning chapters of his book but I am excited to learn more about preparing our students to be Future Ready Learners.

This is a website that I used to learn more about the term Global Competency: http://www.worldsavvy.org/global-competence/

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Tweet from Jimmy Casas (February 10, 2018) 

 

Yup, this is so me. I’m not going to even hide behind any pretense that it’s not. This three sentence tweet not only put me in my place but admittedly pointed out my biggest leadership gap. 

I just recently finished Lolly Daskal's The Leadership Gap, that describe this exact archetype. The Navigator, whose leadership style is to steer people to find their own solutions but whose fault lies in wanting to fix the problem themselves. In turn, they come off as arrogant. 

I recently ran into this exact situation myself with a colleague. “No good deed goes unpunished,” they say. Even your best intentions are met with resistance or outright hostility. Let me repeat. You may think that your efforts are helping them, but “fixing” things for them just opens the door to enabling bad habits to continue and fester. I learned this the hard way. 

I have always shared everything. Worksheets, rubrics, handouts, you name, I share it. But recent feedback that I was given reminded me that as a leader, you must allow space for others to have autonomy and to take ownership of their work. This is key in cultivating leaders and culture. 

Think of this quote by Lao Tzu: 
 
“A leader is best when people barely knows he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say we did it ourselves.” 

Yes, I have done this throughout my teaching career with my students. I don't understand why it took me so long to realize to do the same with adults. It is my go to mantra now. Lesson learned.

Challenge yourself: Take a look at your relationships. How might you empower others to take ownership of their work? 

____ 

Giving credit where credit is due: 
Jimmy Casas, author of Culturize, is one of my favorite educational leaders. 
The Leadership Gap, by Lolly Daskal, is a must read.

Be Your Own Life Coach

Those who are motivated, find ways to motivate themselves.

These people are the embodiment of the Indiana Jones protype. I’ll provide you with an image of what I think this “uber achiever” does: Imagine a plane about to crash into a hot fiery volcano.

They are the ones that are not only piloting the plane; they are the ones simultaneously fixing it. Other people don’t know how they do “it”- but they often manage to do everything on their plate and then some.

This “it” that I refer to is everyday small tasks that range from the mundane to the extraordinary. They just have something in their blood that makes you wonder, “how are they doing it all?” 

Successful people are those who know how to motivate themselves and are their own life coach.

 I know even the best of teachers and leaders who give it their all tire at some point. But, it’s these three values that they embody that packs a punch: Grit, Resiliency and Drive.

 Leaders who exhibit these qualities are those who have practiced these values daily until it became so innate to them, it’s now a habit. They have a never ending source in themselves that they draw upon each day.  Those are the qualities that true leaders need in order to sustain the pace of our profession.

 Here are some reference points on how to start being your own life coach:

1. Strive for progress, not perfection. 
2. Get up everyday knowing you will not settle for mediocre. 
3. Understand you have to work for success and “luck” is the sum of all your small efforts. 
4. Continue to learn from your failure and don’t take rejection personally. Move on. 

 Lastly, my favorite of all values to being my own life coach: Remain resolute, steadfast and unequivocally persistent that everything you embody is a platform for positivity.

 So…tell me, how will you OWN this process of being your source for inspiration?

Field Notes

These are some thoughts that I gathered during my process of becoming and accepting the role of a Teacher Leader.  Below are quotes that helped me refine my own set of core values of teaching and leading.

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #1:

Know who you are.  The first step in people taking you seriously is that you know what your principles are, what you stand for & what you believe in.  Don't let others do the job for you.

“Just be who you want to be, not what others want to see” -Unknown

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #2:

Absolutely take the time to reflect on who you are.  As a side note: Don't ever give the permission for others to define you.

“As you take a moment to be still, you can begin to clarify and amplify your thoughts of who you are as a unique human being.  What attitudes affirm the good qualities of who you are?  What consistent actions can you take today to reinforce your positive self-concept?  Today, you can fully be the person you decide you are!”

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #3:

You are only as good as the company you keep. Relationships matter. The teacher leader role I find is extremely hard. We lead without a title & face a lot of criticism as doers and overachievers.

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” -A.A. Milne

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #4:  

Strive to find a balance in every aspect of your life.  Even if it means simplifying or prioritizing your life.  You owe it to yourself.

“A great leader partners a tough mind with a tender heart.” -Lolly Daskal

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #5:

The term "failure" is sure used a lot in education.  Although failure is the catalyst for change, I prefer "trial and error," which implies a process of experimentation rather than a destination or by product of having taken a risk.

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, that’s why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan

Field Notes of a Teacher Leader #6:

Allowing space for others to have autonomy and to take ownership of their work is key in cultivating leaders and culture.

“A leader is best when people barely knows he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say we did it ourselves.” - Lao Tzu